Stephanie Jane recenzis The Shawl de Cynthia Ozick
Harrowing stories
4 steloj
I'm nearly at the end of this year's AudioSYNC downloads and one I saved up was this short story pairing of The Shawl and Rosa. The title story is very short yet the more powerful for this. A woman, Rosa, walks with her baby daughter and her teenage niece. We discover they are Jewish, they lived in Warsaw, and they are walking to a camp. So much of this story is unsaid that my imagination could take off to fill in the heartrending details. The horror, pain and also resignation of the people is difficult to comprehend. And, although we can anticipate much of the ending before we get there, the reality of it is still unbearably shocking. Some thirty years later, in a much longer story, the eponymous Rosa is eking out an existence in Miami. Alone and still primarily living in her past, her single room is spartan …
I'm nearly at the end of this year's AudioSYNC downloads and one I saved up was this short story pairing of The Shawl and Rosa. The title story is very short yet the more powerful for this. A woman, Rosa, walks with her baby daughter and her teenage niece. We discover they are Jewish, they lived in Warsaw, and they are walking to a camp. So much of this story is unsaid that my imagination could take off to fill in the heartrending details. The horror, pain and also resignation of the people is difficult to comprehend. And, although we can anticipate much of the ending before we get there, the reality of it is still unbearably shocking. Some thirty years later, in a much longer story, the eponymous Rosa is eking out an existence in Miami. Alone and still primarily living in her past, her single room is spartan and hardly a home. Paid for by her niece whom Rosa considers she rescued despite everything, the two women have a bizarre symbiotic relationship. Each clinging to the other over miles due to their shared history even though Stella, the niece, has endeavoured to shut those years out of her new American life. I was more intrigued by this relationship than by a potentially burgeoning romance for Rosa with an older Polish man, also from Warsaw but who left in the 1920s so 'not my Warsaw' to Rosa. Rosa, the story, is a less harrowing listen than The Shawl but its subject of what happens afterwards, how survivors manage to exist and live after escaping horror is just as thought-provoking and not something to which I had previously given much consideration.